Fin De Siècle
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This exhibition and the publication that By the mid-1990s she began to sketch from accompanies it are as much about an artist, life, but the difference it made in the look of Elizabeth Peyton, as they are about an era. her paintings is subtle, almost negligible; Although it began in the early to mid-1990s, all the work retains a mixture of intimacy and Fin it is difficult to pinpoint when this era ended; stylization whether it was painted from all that can be conclusively said is that it is photographs or from life. de definitely over. Peyton’s work, though, In the very contemporary art world, fifteen endures, and to this day it continues to years is a long time to be at the center of a speak to us in the present tense. discourse. Peyton was not the only figurative Siècle One of the extraordinary things about painter to attract attention and controversy Peyton’s oeuvre is that it can serve as a during this time, but her work arguably Laura Hoptman chronicle of a particular period — at a certain attracted more attention and more contro- moment in the history of culture in certain versy than most others, at least during places among a few people who were enthu- the first ten years of her career. It did this siastically making it. Sometimes they knew because it was and is the most radical each other; sometimes they were just mutual example of a particular kind of popular fans. In retrospect, her paintings have realism that emerged in the 1990s and become a kind of essence of a fifteen-year reached its apex during the first few years period in popular culture, something like a of the new millennium. Her paintings are complicated perfume that retains the sen- also the most appealing, a characteristic sory grace notes of a hundred different that made them all the more problematic, exquisite elements, but on its own is distinct. emerging as they did in a period when many If that period in a certain slice of culture critics and institutions were suspicious in the United States, as well as in cities like enough of visual pleasure to have written it London and Berlin, is gone on the streets out of the aesthetic conversation. and in the galleries, it remains forever fresh in her paintings. Despite their myriad refer- ences to art history, they have never coaxed us into nostalgia, and even now, looking at a 1995 portrait of Kurt Cobain, we can feel a mix of rue, admiration, and sentiment, not as a memory, but again as if the picture were painted yesterday. This feeling is similar to listening to a great song recorded decades ago; it still does what it set out to do, even if it is so familiar as to be emblematic. Peyton’s paintings were seen by a relatively small but influential audience in 1995, the year of her first substantial exhibi- tion in a commercial gallery in New York; since that time, her paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints have been exhibited Elizabeth Peyton annually in either New York, Los Angeles, Gavin Brown February 2007 London, Berlin, or other major capitals 2007 Oil on board across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. The 11 3/4 3 9 in (29.8 3 22.9 cm) regularity of her exhibition record has allowed interested viewers to follow her Looking back, there is no doubt that the work closely and comprehensively. What creation and reception of Peyton’s paintings is revealed when the work is seen in toto is in the 1990s utterly changed the contempo- an astonishing consistency of technique, rary art landscape in New York, and perhaps of subject, and of purpose. From her first in London and Berlin as well. Mapping out exhibition, this artist seems to have emerged how much has changed since that time in full possession of her faculties, with a and considering the repercussions of that project to capture in portraiture individuals change are crucial not only to begin the task in whom she discerns a magical quality — of making a history of our last fin de siècle, an indescribable mixture of romanticism, but to begin the work of forging an under- beauty, grace, creativity, innocence, sexua- standing of the start of our new century. lity, “zazz.” She found her preferred medium Considering her paintings in the light of their early — oil on board mounted on a frame of origins offers us the possibility to do both about a quarter of an inch thick — and she of these things. has rarely deviated from these materials, It is a truism that figurative painting has or from her paintings’ small size (most are never left the contemporary art discourse, around eleven by fourteen inches). From but it is also fair to say that at the beginning the beginning, her source materials were of the 1990s it was not central to the art con- photographs that she found or snapped versation at the cutting edge, in criticism, herself, as well as film, video, and stills. in galleries, and especially in museums of 225 PEYTON_FINAL_225-256_NDV.indd 225 7/22/08 12:01:00 PM contemporary art, except in a highly ironized swift ascent around 1996, creating a bubble of friends, friends of friends, and even and acquiring it for museum collections. of paint application in a single motif. You can Wales (1997). Subjects, famous as well as form. Critical and institutional taste in the that, at this writing, is at its most swollen, strangers. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s By that time, Tiravanija and Peyton had see it in their love of the sinuous serpentine obscure, are often depicted during the first early 1990s was built upon premises of anti- with European and American figurative Food cafeteria, by Andy Warhol’s Factory, already befriended Gavin Brown, an artist line and their fascination with the shocking flowering of their genius: Napoleon (1992) not visuality, even though contemporary artists painters riding its crest. by humanism, Buddhism, and the plain old and budding art dealer who was working at clarity of primitive draftsmanship, from cave as Emperor of the French, but as a victorious — not necessarily painters — were trying At the very beginning of the 1990s though, desire to connect, Tiravanija’s mediums as 303 Gallery, which Tiravanija joined around painting to Shaker design. The generosity, general of 1799; Princess Elizabeth (1993) to find their way out of the deserts of cynical, New York was in a recession, real-estate well as his grand themes were one and the that time. By 1994 Brown had opened his first vigor, lack of cynicism, and, okay, love that at the age of eighteen, nine years before she endgame Conceptualism. Benjamin prices were at a pause after the go-go 1980s, same: love and community. Although New York gallery in a small storefront about emanated from the work of these painters acceded to the throne but just at the moment Buchloh’s “Refuse and Refuge” (1993), an and the art market was definitely in the deep her medium could not be more different, as far west on Broome Street as you could was palpable to anyone who managed to see when she took on the weight of her royal essay on the work of Gabriel Orozco, laid out doldrums. This is where Peyton comes in, these are Peyton’s grand themes as well. go. Peyton was among the founding artists those early exhibitions of Doig (1994), Ofili responsibilities during World War II; Kurt the strategy that anti-object types would use as do her then-husband Rirkrit Tiravanija, Community, for both Tiravanija and Peyton, represented; Tiravanija left 303 to join Brown (1995), Dawson (1995), Owens (1997), and Cobain (1995) before worldwide fame, drugs, to pump new life into the tired hard-line of her friend the art dealer Gavin Brown, and, is a rich and complicated notion. On the two years later. This choice of a marginally of course Peyton (1995).2 and Courtney Love; Al Gore (2000) as an doctrinaire Conceptualism. As made clear peripherally, me. Because I lived through one hand, it signifies the stuff of the work peripheral location, just far enough from the By 1991 she had already hit on the seeds idealistic young man of the post-Vietnam by Orozco’s photographs and arrangements the 1990s as a participant in the artistic itself, a very Warholian notion, as, in both other important contemporary galleries to of what would be her mature style; her first exhi- era. Finally, these subjects are most often of tweaked found objects, Conceptualism at discourse, this narrative can only be some- Tiravanija’s and Peyton’s cases, the commu- be inconvenient, would become a pattern; bitions, as part of group shows in galleries depicted in contemplative, private moments that moment had quietly been replaced by an what of a personal take on a small portion nity in question is largely an orchestrated from Broome, Brown would move to the or, more interestingly, in alternative spaces rather than active ones. Reading, sleeping, at adamantly material kind of sculptural work of the activities that took place at the time. one filled with carefully chosen participants. not-quite-Chelsea address of West 15th like the ladies room of a SoHo restaurant, leisure on a sofa, a towel, or a deck chair, her that hid under a veneer of Conceptualism, I offer it, though, as history, with its biases Tiravanija, describing the medium of his Street. Presently, his gallery is in the far a rented room at the Hotel Chelsea, an subjects have a self-contained absorption a bloody, beating heart of ecstatic visuality and parameters made as apparent as installations, goes so far as to list “lots of West Village, an outpost in an area that has apartment in Cologne, and a pub in London, that is mutually reinforced by the composi- that included super-sophisticated graphic possible.